Occupational Hazard

Today's podcast will feature four stories about people whose jobs put them face-to-face with the unthinkable. The audio from all four of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. The first story you'll hear is called "Most Dangerous Job" and it's about a horrifying accident in a terrifying profession. The second story you'll hear is called "Silent Flight" and it's about fighter pilots who witness something truly horrifying in the air. The third story you'll hear is called "A Rumble Beneath" and it's about a firefighter who investigates a fire in a farmer's building but what happens next might give you nightmares. And the fourth and final story you'll hear is called "What Came Before" and it's about a factory that turns out to be a total death trap. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format and you come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload two-three even four times every week. So, if that's of interest to you, around the follow buttons birthday, begin stealing all their mail and make sure when their grandmother's mail arrives, you open them up and steal all the cash from inside. Okay, let's get into our first story called "Most Dangerous Job" One of the least known "Most Hazardous Jobs" on the planet is saturation diving. These highly specialized divers do construction and demolition at depths up to 2,000 feet below the surface. Now, unless you're familiar with diving, that depth may not stand out to you, but it should. Deep sea divers breathe compressed air, which is usually a mixture of oxygen, helium, and nitrogen. During the dive, the oxygen is breathed in and completely used up and does not linger inside of their body. But the helium and nitrogen, they are absorbed as they're breathed in into the bloodstream and they remain there for the duration of the dive. As the diver ascends in the water column, the pressure on them from the water is reduced, which allows these two gases to clear out of their bloodstream. But they clear at different rates. Helium is considered a fast gas, which means you absorb it quickly and get rid of it quickly. But nitrogen is a little bit slower, and so it takes longer foot to absorb into your body and then takes longer for it to clear out of your body. If a diver doesn't respect this and just rockets to the surface, any of the nitrogen or helium that did not diffuse out of their bodies will bubble up inside of them like a shaken soda, and it will wreak havoc on them, and many times it can be fatal. This condition is known as decompression sickness, or the bends. The way divers mitigate getting the bends is they have decompression stops in their dive, which means after they go down to a certain depth, on the way up, they will stop at a certain depth and just wait, and they will allow these gases to diffuse out of their bodies before making their way up to the surface. These decompression stops are planned and built into the dive beforehand. The deeper you go, the more frequent your decompression stops will be, and the longer they will take. To give you a sense of just how long these decompression stops can be, if you dive down to just 250 feet, it might only take you about 15 or 20 minutes to get down there, but the return trip will take almost 4 hours due to the number of decompression stops. If you're going down to 2000 feet, it will take you over 33 hours to ascend. Naturally, this ridiculous time constraint poses a huge problem for any industry that relies on deep-sea work, like oil and gas, because they simply don't have enough divers to compensate for how long these decompression stops take. They tried sending remote controlled vehicles down to these depths to work on these offshore wells and rags and pipelines, but they lack the touch and maneuverability to do the job. And so, in the 1960s, a crazy solution was implemented to get more people down to these depths for longer periods of time, and it was then that the commercial saturation diver was born. Instead of diver spending hours and hours making all those stops on the way to the surface, they constructed these underwater chambers that the divers would go into after their shift was done. They would sleep inside of these claustrophobia-inducing metal chambers, and then the next day they would put their dive gear back on, hop outside of the chamber, and then just start working again. Nowadays, these chambers are either left down at depth where the diver is located, and they can just go in and out, and that's the whole process. Or, there's a dive bell that sits down near the work site, and the diver, when they're done, goes back into the dive bell. It kind of looks like an escape pod, and it's raised by a crane all the way up to the surface, where it's placed on top of a ship or a rig. And inside of this dive bell, the pressure is artificially made to match the depth they've been working at. And then when they're placed up on the surface on the ship or the rig, the bell is connected to a bigger chamber that's also set to the same pressure they are at down at depth. And they can go inside this chamber, they can sleep, they can eat, go to the bathroom, and then the next day the process is reversed where they go back into the dive bell, it lowers them down to depth, they hop out, and they continue their work. The point of the system is to keep divers fully saturated with their inner gases, like nitrogen and helium, so that they only have to do one major decompression at the very end of their shift, which is oftentimes multiple weeks long. Now, while the saturation diving system has worked extremely well, it's still extremely hazardous, which is part of the reason why it pays really, really well. Some divers have died because they panicked and got hurt. And if you think about what their job really entails, they are going down thousands of feet all on their own into total pitch black nothingness. They have one crummy light that can barely see about 10 feet in front of them. They're operating heavy, dangerous equipment, there are large animals swimming around them that they can't see, oftentimes they're perched on a pipeline clinging to it, that if they were to fall off of it and detach from the dive bell, they would sink into an abyss and no one could get them again. And so it's an easy place to get hurt. Other divers have died because they were given the wrong mixture of gas, and so at depth they began having seizures, and there's nothing anyone can do to help them. But the most well-known and brutal saturation diving accident involves something called explosive decompression. On November 5, 1983, four saturation divers were working off of the Biford Dolphin Oil rig in the North Sea. Just after 4am, two of the men, Edwin Coward and Roy Lucas, were in their bunks lounging inside of that chamber that sat up on the rig. The other two men, Bjorn Bergenson and Trolls Hellevich, had just finished their shift down below, they had gone into the dive bell and were being raised by Crane to go up to the chamber on the rig. Once the dive bell was up on the rig, two dive tenders named William Crammond and Martin Saunders began clamping the bell onto the side of the chamber. Without getting two into the weeds about how it actually works, getting divers to go from one highly pressurized area, the dive bell into another highly pressurized area, the chamber and vice versa, basically it just boils down to opening doors at very specific times and doing it wrong will result in catastrophe. The process was going just fine, Hellevich and Bergenson had exited the dive bell they'd gotten into the chamber and they were literally in the process of shutting their internal door when outside dive tender Crammond made a huge mistake. Before Hellevich had sealed his door, Crammond for whatever reason undid the latch that connected the dive bell to the chamber. And what this did is it created a vacuum that instantaneously depressurized the chamber where the four men were from nine atmospheres down to one and it created so much pressure coming out of the chamber that it fired the dive bell straight out like a bullet killing Crammond and severely injuring Saunders on the outside. Inside the chamber, all four men literally had the air ripped out of their chests. Hellevich, who was closest to the door, was literally sucked through the narrow crack because the door had not sealed. He was sucked through and rocketed out the other side. Basically, all four men exploded, but fortunately they died instantly. Our next story is called Silent Flight. Around 11.30am on August 14th, 2005, two Greek military fighter pilots flew in their jets high above Athens, Greece, following behind a Boeing 737 commercial airplane. This commercial airplane was Helios Airways Flight 522. It had left Cyprus at 9am that morning with 121 people on board and it was scheduled to have landed in Athens 45 minutes earlier. But instead, shortly after takeoff, Flight 522's pilots had stopped responding to air traffic control and now the plane was just circling right over the city. And so at some point, the military became concerned that perhaps Flight 522 had been hijacked and at some point the hijackers were going to crash the plane into a city. And so in response to that, they had sent up these two fighter pilots to see what was going on. Now when the two fighter pilots arrived on station in the air right behind Flight 522, at first they couldn't tell what the issue was. There was no fire or visible smoke or any damage to the aircraft and so the two fighter pilots in tandem flew up alongside the plane so they could look inside the windows. And when they did and they saw inside to the actual fuselage, they saw all the oxygen masks were dropped down in front of the passengers and all the passengers had the masks on. However, all the passengers were passed out. They were slumped over with these masks strapped to their faces. Now the fighter pilots had no idea if these passengers were unconscious or dead or some combination. But for right now, all they cared about was are the pilots conscious and able to fly this craft. And so the two fighter pilots flew up until they were parallel with the cockpit and they looked in the window and they saw not the pilots, they saw the oxygen mask dropped down. but the pilots were not there. Instead, they saw this one guy who was clearly not a pilot, he was not in a pilot's uniform, looking out the window with them, just waving, just some random guy. And so the two fighter pilots had no idea what to make of this. Before the fighter pilots could even begin to react to whatever was going on here, this random guy in the cockpit looked out at one of the fighter pilots and just began gesturing down with his index finger, and then a moment later, flight 522, began to descend. To fully understand what happens next. We need to go back to just before 9am on the same morning. So 9am was takeoff, and right before the crew of flight 522 did their routine safety checks of the aircraft, and they determined that the craft was ready for takeoff. However, they had actually missed one crucial thing. There was a knob on this aircraft that was switched to the wrong setting by a maintenance person right before takeoff, and nobody had noticed, so it wasn't put back to where it needed to be. And so flight 522 wound up taking off on schedule, and at first everything was fine, totally normal. But about two minutes into the flight, all these alarms began sounding on the aircraft, and then the oxygen mass dropped from the ceiling. And the reason for that is that knob that had been set to the wrong setting, controlled how much breathable air was in the aircraft during flight. It basically had been switched to off, so there was nothing to breathe in the airplane. And so by the time these masks were dropping down, people on the plane were already passing out, including the pilots they were passed out pretty much immediately when those masks came down. And so it's absolutely chaos in this plane, everybody's passing out, except for one person. 25-year-old flight attendant Andreas Padromo, who when the masks came down, he was awake, he was conscious, and instead of grabbing one of those masks from the overhead, he managed to connect himself to one of the emergency oxygen tanks. Now the reason that's very important is the mask that dropped down on an aircraft have a very limited supply of oxygen. But Andreas, who was actually training to be a pilot, was aware of that, and he put on this emergency oxygen tank, which had way more oxygen to it. And so suddenly he's breathing a much longer air source and he's looking around the plane, and everybody's passed out, except for him. Now we don't know at what point he learned this, but at some point, Andreas would have noticed as he's breathing on this emergency oxygen tank that out the window he would see the plane is just flying in circles, and it would have dawned on him that not only are the passengers out, but very likely so are the pilots. And so literally there's nobody flying this plane, and so he had a decision to make. Either he was going to just sit here until the plane crashed, or he was going to do something, like try to fly the plane. And that's what he ultimately decided to do. And so Andreas stood up, he took his oxygen tank and he headed into the cockpit, and after moving aside the unconscious pilots, he attempted to fly this plane. And so the two fighter pilots who flew up alongside the cockpit and looked in and saw that one random guy who was waving to them, that was Andreas. And unfortunately, despite the fact that Andreas was training to become a pilot, he was not remotely qualified or skilled enough to fly a big Boeing 737. He had no idea how to fly this aircraft, and making the situation even worse is very shortly after Andreas entered the cockpit, the plane ran out of fuel. And so it left its automatic holding pattern that it had been in, flying in circles, and just automatically began trying to descend. But that required pilot input to land the plane, but Andreas knew he couldn't possibly land this plane successfully. And so as the plane automatically began its descent down towards Athens, this huge city full of people, Andreas did the one thing he could do. He took one last look at one of the fighter pilots outside the window, and he gestured to them that the plane was now beginning to descend. And then Andreas, he grabbed the yoke of the aircraft, and he intentionally banked it to the left, basically flying the plane away from Athens, and he guided this plane into an unpopulated hillside where it crashed. Andreas and all 120 people on that plane all died in the crash. However, because of Andreas' heroic final act of steering the plane away from Athens, a single person on the ground was hurt. Our next story is called A Rumble Beneath. At 11.40 am on November 29, 1986, a 36-year-old volunteer fire chief named Jack Schofstahl parked his fire truck on a country road right next to this huge farm in rural Indiana. Jack was there with his assistant chief named Donald Schnittger. After parking, Jack looked down the road, and he saw the owner of this farm, Jeffrey Wolfe, was standing on the side of the road, waving to them and turning around and pointing back towards his property, and so Jack and Donald, they looked out the window out in the direction that Jeff was pointing, and they saw there was this huge storage building off in the distance that clearly was part of the farm, and there appeared to be this thin plume of smoke coming off the top of it. And so Jack and Donald hop out of the fire truck, they hustle over to Jeffrey, and the three of them jog across the property over to this building. And when they get there, again, it's very clear that something is burning inside of this building. But this storage building was packed to the brim with stuff, like there was no way to get into this storage building from the front, really the only way to actually look inside of this building to see what was burning is by climbing up this ladder that ran to the top of this, you know, 80 foot tall building, or the very top, there was a window that looked down into the storage building. And so basically Jack and Jeff said they would climb the ladder up to the top, Donald, the assistant chief, he would stay on the ground, and Jack and Jeffrey would go up there, look inside and see if they could actually figure out what was burning, so they could make a decision about how to approach this, you know, what equipment they might need, and what to do. And so Jack and Jeff, they make their way up the ladder to the very top, they get to this window, and Jack, he looks inside, and again, it's very clear something is burning in here, but he can't tell where it's coming from. He sees smoke coming out right next to him, but it's just there's so much stuff inside of this building you just can't tell where it's coming from. But Jeffrey clearly had placed this big piece of plywood on the very top of all the stuff inside of the storage building, as sort of like a makeshift platform if you wanted to, you know, I guess walk inside of this building in the one area you could walk into. And so he turned to look at Jeffrey and he's like, yeah, you can stand on that. And so Jack climbed through the window. And so he gets on there, it's kind of like he's surfing, you know, basically balancing on the top of all this stuff, you know, at the very top of this massive building. And he's looking around, but now Jack has a better vantage point. He's sort of more in the center of this big building. And as he's looking around, he identifies where this fire is coming from. And you know, the fire was not particularly big, but he could clearly see where it was. This was not some enormous fire, but he really had no way to attempt to put it out without leaving the building going back down and getting more equipment. And so Jack, who's still standing on this piece of plywood, he pulls out his radio and he radios down to Donald, the assistant chief who's down on the ground. And he says, hey, you know, we located the fire. We're going to come back down, get our equipment, we'll come back up here, we'll put this thing out, we'll be good. But after Jack put the radio back on his belt, and he turned to walk back across this plywood back to the window and, you know, down the ladder, before he got off the plywood, there was this low rumbling sound that came from right underneath his feet. At the same time, Donald, who's back down on the ground and who's just received this radio call from his partner, saying, hey, we're going to leave right now and get our equipment and put the fire out, you know, Donald, he's down there staring up at the exit, up at the top there where Jack and Jeffrey had gone, and so far, he hasn't seen either of them come out of this building. It's just been silence, like he heard a little bit of a rumbling sound inside of this building, and he didn't really know what it was, but, you know, no one's coming out of the building. And he's thinking how strange that is, like Jack just said, he was coming out to get his equipment, where is he? And so Donald grabs his radio and begins repeatedly calling Jack to say, hey, where are you? He said you're coming out, where are you guys? What's going on? He didn't get an answer, and so really quickly, Donald realized there could be an emergency inside of this building. Like for all we know, the fire is way worse, and they're trapped, or who knows what's going on, but, based on protocol, Donald couldn't just on his own go charging up the ladder and go right in there to, you know, save the day because he has no idea what he's walking into. He needs to make sure that he calls for help, gets other people here, and then can help explain what's going on here, instead of he himself going up there and potentially being another casualty. And so, instead of climbing that ladder, Donald began calling for help. And very quickly, an entire fleet of additional firefighters, and police officers, and ambulances showed up. I mean, there's all these people descending on the farm, and really quickly, first responders climbed up that ladder, they looked inside of the building, and they figured out what happened. So when Jack climbed through that window at the top of this building, and he stood on top of that piece of plywood, that Jeffrey had placed up there on top of all the stuff in the storage building, and you know, he was standing there, balancing himself as he's looking around for where this fire is. Eventually, that rumbling under his feet was all the stuff underneath the plywood shifting, and he sort of lost his balance, and Jack fell off the plywood into basically the sea of stuff inside the storage building. And Jeffrey, when he saw this happen, he had not fallen in, but he turned and basically tried to get in there and grab on to Jack to get him out, but he too inadvertently fell into what was inside of this building, and what was inside of this building was corn. This was an 80 foot tall grain silo packed the brim with grain, and so that piece of plywood was resting on the surface of the grain, and so when Jack fell into the grain, it was like it swallowed him whole, like quick sand, and then Jeffrey in an attempt to save Jack also fell in, got swallowed whole and they disappeared and suffocated. It would ultimately take nearly three hours for bulldozers to basically break apart this building and sift through all the corn to finally locate Jack and Jeffrey. The next and final story of today's episode is called What Came Before. [Music] Around 4.45 pm on February 11, 1995, a 50-year-old man named Eric Tollett sat in his office in the furniture factory that he owned in Northumberland, which is a pretty rural country in northern England. From inside his office, all Eric could hear outside was the thumping of the rain on the roof. There was this low-pressure system in the area which was causing a really intense thunderstorm. In fact, the storm was so bad that Eric had actually decided to close the factory for the day, so while his employees could stay home during the storm. And Eric was glad that he could actually afford to give his employees a day off like this, because it had not always been that way. He had bought this factory 16 years earlier and it had taken all of his savings and scrapping together all of his money to actually make the investment and then after he purchased the factory, it required a huge renovation to make it ready to be a furniture factory that he could actually sell products out of. But now, after 16 years of hard work, you know, his business was quite successful, and so a day like today was no big deal. You know, he wasn't all that concerned about the lost profits that day. Instead, he was just using the time to catch up on some admin work and also spend some time with his family. Eric's girlfriend, whose name was Leslie, was at the factory with him, hanging out in the office as well, and also Eric's brother, whose name was Donald, had taken Leslie's eight-year-old son over to the factory's attached garage to go play. But, as Eric, you know, shuffled through his paperwork and did a few things and Leslie was over at the window looking outside, suddenly the door to his office swung open, and it was Leslie's eight-year-old son who came barging in, there's no Donald, so Eric's brother's not with him, and the son, he just looked totally panicked, and he immediately said before, you know, Eric or Leslie could ask any questions, that Donald had collapsed over in the attached garage. Now, initially, Eric didn't really know what to make of this, but his first thought was, you know, his brother, Donald, was 60, and he did have some health issues, and just hearing this kid say that Donald had collapsed, it's signaled to Eric, like, oh my goodness, did Donald have a heart attack? Or he was also thinking, you know, this kid's only eight-years-old, is he overreacting? You know, is there actually something totally benign happening? You know, whatever it was, Eric knew immediately that it was time to drop everything and run over there and check on Donald. And so that's what he did. He and Leslie put their stuff down, they ran with the eight-year-old, you know, through all the way to this attached garage, which, you know, in virtue of it being attached, they never actually went outside into the storm, they just ran straight to this garage, and sure enough, when they got there, there was Donald laying on the ground. And so before Eric ran over to his brother to assess him to see what was going on, he just stopped right in the doorway and turned to Leslie and her son, and he told them, "Go back to my office and call 911, I'll be in there as soon as I can." And so they turned, they left, and then Eric, he turned back around, rushed into the garage, and knelt down next to Donald, and right away he could tell that his brother was not breathing, and as he sort of feeling around for some sign of life, suddenly Eric began to feel this incredible tightness in his chest, and then before he knew it, it blacked out and collapsed right next to his brother. So before Eric purchased this factory 16 years earlier, it had been a factory, but it was not a furniture factory, it was a coal factory, and in virtue of that, there was a coal mine that literally was attached to the structure. Basically the coal would come up out of the mine and be processed inside of this, you know, big warehouse. Now when Eric bought it, he knew that there was this coal mine, and there was this entrance to the coal mine connected to the structure, but the coal mine was not in use, the entrance to the coal mine had been completely boarded up, and it really played no role whatsoever. However, over the decade and a half that he owned this property and didn't think at all about that coal mine, well over that time, this poisonous gas called choke damp began to develop inside the mine, and then on the day that, you know, Eric and Donald collapsed inside the garage, well it was because the low pressure storm outside caused those poisonous gases to rise up and seep out of the boarded up entrance, and those poisonous choke damp gases built up inside of that attached garage, basically making that entire room lethal to anybody inside of there. And so unfortunately, Donald would die from poisoning. Eric when he passed out, he nearly died, but he was pulled out in time, and ultimately woke up in the hospital and he would survive. A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Bollen podcast, Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Bollen. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bohn and Cole Locasio, research and fact-checking by Shelley Shoe, Samantha Van Hooose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fassiano, research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear, audio editing and post-produced by Whit Locasio and Jordan Stidem, production support by Antonio Manada and Delana Corley, artwork by Jessica Clogston Keiner, theme song "Something Wicked" by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Bollen podcast, and just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Bollen podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Bollen YouTube channel that very same day, and trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Bollen. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and add free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com/podcastplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So, that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya. [Music]